J. Coetzee - Slow Man

He opens his eyes. Wayne is still by the bedside, sweat pearling on his upper lip. Of course! At school Wayne would have had it drummed into him that you do not leave the room until the teacher signals the session is over. What a relief it must have been to Wayne when at last he was free of school and teachers and all that, when he could put his foot down flat on the accelerator, wind down the window and feel the wind on his face, chew gum, turn up the music as loud as he liked, shout 'Fuck you, mate!' at old geezers as he ripped past them! And now here he is, constrained again, having to put on a dutiful face, to grope for apologetic-sounding words.

So the puzzle resolves itself. Wayne is waiting for a signal, and he wants Wayne out of his life. 'Good of you to come, lad,' he says, 'but I have a headache and I need to sleep. So goodbye.'

THE DAY NURSE recommended by Mrs Putts is named Sheena. Sheena looks nineteen, but her papers attest she is twenty-nine. She is fat, with a hard, lardy, confident fatness, and under all questioning unshakeably good-humoured. He takes an immediate dislike to her, he does not want her, but Mrs Putts presses him. 'It's specialised work, private nursing,' says Mrs Putts. 'Sheena has worked with amputees before. You would be a fool to turn her down.' So he yields. In turn Mrs Putts concedes that he need not engage a night nurse, as long as he registers himself with an emergency service and keeps a pager handy at all times.

He takes care to stay on the right side of Mrs Putts because he has what he believes to be an accurate idea of Mrs Putts's powers. Mrs Putts is part of the welfare system. Welfare means caring for people who cannot care for themselves. If, somewhere down the line, Mrs Putts were to decide that he is incapable of caring for himself, that he needs to be protected from his own incompetence, what recourse would he have? He has no allies to do battle on his behalf. He has only himself.

It is possible, of course, that he overestimates Mrs Putts's concern. When it comes to welfare, when it comes to care and the caring professions, he is almost certainly out of date. In the brave new world into which both he and Mrs Putts have been reborn, whose watchword is Laissez faire!, perhaps Mrs Putts regards herself as neither his keeper nor her brother's keeper nor anyone else's. If in this new world the crippled or the infirm or the indigent or the homeless wish to eat from rubbish bins and spread their bedroll in the nearest entranceway, let them do so: let them huddle tight, and if they wake up alive the next morning, good on them.

When the ambulancemen bring him home, Sheena is ready and waiting. It is she who reorganises his bedroom for him, supervises the cleaning woman, instructs the handyman where to install rails, and generally takes over. She has already drafted a day-by-day schedule for the two of them covering meals, exercises, and what she calls SC, stump care, which she tapes to the wall above his head. It includes three blocks, one in mid-morning, one at noon, one in the afternoon, labelled 'SD PRIVATE TIME', time during which she retires to the kitchen to refresh herself. She keeps her supplies in the fridge on a shelf that she labels 'SD PRIVATE'. So that she will not perish of boredom she keeps the radio on in the kitchen, on a station that alternates clamouring advertisements with thudding music. When he asks her to turn the sound lower she turns the sound lower; nevertheless, without straining, he can still hear it.

The first test of his physical powers comes when, with Sheena supporting his elbow, he attempts to use the toilet. The sitting-down manoeuvre defeats him: the left leg, the leg left to him, is as weak as putty. Sheena purses her lips. 'Back to bed at once,' she says. 'I'll fetch you the potty.'

She calls the bedpan the potty; she calls his penis his willie. Halfway through a sponge bath, before dealing with the stump, she pauses and puts on a baby voice. 'Now if he wants Sheena to wash his willie, he must ask very nicely,' she says. 'Otherwise he will think Sheena is one of those naughty girls. Those naughty naughty girls.' And she gives him a playful slap on the arm to show it is just a joke.

He puts up with Sheena until the end of the week, then telephones Mrs Putts. 'I am going to ask Sheena not to come back,' he says. 'I cannot abide her. You will have to find me someone else.'

Getting rid of Sheena turns out to be by no means as simple as that. By the time her professional pride has been mollified he has had to fork out two months' wages. He wonders how often in her nursing career she has brought off coups on a similar scale. Perhaps the radio was just a trick to madden him, and the baby-talk too.

After Sheena he is tended by a succession of nurses from the agency, nurses who call themselves temps and come for a day or two at a time. 'Can't you find me someone regular?' he asks Mrs Putts on the telephone. 'I am stretched to the limit,' says Mrs Putts. 'There's a huge demand for frail-care nursing. Be patient, you are on my A list.'

His elation at having escaped the hospital does not last long. He slumps into a bad mood, and the mood does not leave him. He does not like any of the temps – does not like being treated as a child or an idiot, does not like the bouncy, cheerful voice they put on for him. 'How are we today?' they say. 'That's good,' they say, even when he has not bothered to reply.

'When are we having our leg fitted?' they say. 'So much better than crutches, a new leg, it really is, once you get the hang of it. You'll see.'

From being irascible he becomes sullen. He wants to be left alone; he does not want to speak to anyone; he suffers fits of what he thinks of as dry weeping. If only real tears would come! he thinks. If only I could be washed away in tears! He welcomes those days when for one reason or another no one arrives to take care of him, even if it means he has to get by on biscuits and orange juice.

He blames his gloom on the painkillers. Which is worse, the cloud of gloom in the head or the ache in the bone that keeps him awake all night? He tries doing without the pills and ignoring the pain. But the gloom does not lift. The gloom seems to have settled in, to be part of the climate.

In the old days, the days before the accident, he did not have what he would call a gloomy temperament. He might have been solitary, but only as certain male animals are solitary. There was always more than enough to keep him occupied. He took out books from the library, he went to the cinema; he cooked for himself, he even baked his own bread; he did not own a car but rode a bicycle or walked. If such a way of life made him eccentric, it was eccentricity within the mildest Australian limits. He was tall, he was rangy, he had preserved a certain wiry strength; he was the kind of man who might last into his nineties, eccentricities and all.

Well, he may still live to be ninety, but if that happens it will not be by choice. He has lost the freedom of movement and it would be foolish to think it will ever be restored to him, with or without artificial limbs. He will never stride up Black Hill again, never pedal off to the market to do his shopping, much less come swooping on his bicycle down the curves of Montacute. The universe has contracted to this flat and the block or two around, and it will not expand again.

A circumscribed life. What would Socrates say about that? May a life become so circumscribed that it is no longer worth living? Men come out of prison, out of years of staring at the same blank wall, without gloom taking possession of their souls. What is so special about losing a limb? A giraffe that loses a leg will surely perish; but giraffes do not have the agencies of the modern state, embodied in Mrs Putts, watching over their welfare. Why should he not settle for a modestly circumscribed life in a city that is not inhospitable to the frail aged?